Tome of Stars by Stargazer

Tome of Stars by Stargazer
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Romance, Contemporary
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

“Tome of Stars” is a poetic odyssey chronicling a tragic romance, told through 100 interconnected sonnets. The pages explore love and loss, belief and apostasy, trauma, madness, reason, myth, and memory. While written in classic Shakespearean form, its voice and vision are contemporary. It was written with the hope that it might resonate with those who have loved and lost on a transformative scale.

Sometimes love has thorns.

I enjoyed the fact that these sonnets followed the rules of this style of poetry so closely while seeing the characters through the course of their relationship. Normally, contemporary poetry does not include so much space for character and plot development, much less strict expectations about rhythm and rhyme, so it was interesting to watch the characters learn and grow as a result of their positive and negative experiences with love in this format.

With that being said, I did struggle to make sense of what I learned about the protagonist at times. Their mood shifted so rapidly that I found myself wondering how Stargirl, their love interest, would have described the same scenes. Did she find those moments as sweet and romantic as he did, or was this a case of a possibly unreliable narrator? While I wouldn’t expect the author to spell everything out directly for their audience, I did wonder if these other interpretations of the text were something that were intended or if I was reading too much into it. Having more guidance in this area would have gone a long way to encourage me to choose a higher rating as the writing style itself was beautiful.

The inclusion of various myths were a nice addition to this collection. They gave it a timeless feeling, especially once the author went into even further detail about these metaphors and how they were related to Stargirl. While I can’t go into a lot of detail about this without sharing spoilers, do keep an eye out for those lines and sonnets as they appear. They were well done and interesting no matter which myths they were referencing.

Tome of Stars was an adventure to read.